To Reject Trump the Perverse, Poets Wage a Battle in Verse

Some people stand up to President Trump in the courts, others in street protests. And the poets among us, they battle President Trump with an arsenal of verse.

The Republican man of the hour Is a wellspring of bluster and glower. Trump is rich and he’s white, How’s he leading the fight Against entrenched Establishment power?

That’s by Bill McGloughlin, a librarian in Charlotte, N.C., who was one of the winners of my Donald Trump Poetry Contest. We had about 2,000 entries, and today I’m publishing the winners.

Some relied on humor — while complaining that almost nothing rhymes with “orange”! — and that’s the tack taken by Stephen Benko, a retired businessman in Fairfield, Conn. Benko has published an entire book of poems about Trump, but this one is new:

If God has made man in his image Please explain our new President’s visage That pucker and scowl Look like murder most foul What in heaven, Lord, earned us this priv’lege?

Dan Letwin, a history professor at Penn State, wrote a timely “ode to alternative facts”:

Well now, Kellyanne Conway has lately conceived Of a new understanding of what to believe When the truth gives you heartburn, don’t worry, relax You can always resort to alternative facts!

Oh it works for the Donald and all of his hacks As they go ’bout promoting their retrograde acts Don’t fret if your documentation is lax You can always get by with alternative facts!

Don’t fear all those women with signs on their backs The straight and the queer, the whites and blacks You can trivialize them with snide little cracks And wash them away with alternative facts!

Just as loggers might swing an alternative ax And fell a great tree with alternative whacks When the truth won’t cooperate, try some new tacks We live in an age of alternative facts!

I sought out pro-Trump poems, but poets seem to be disproportionately aghast at his presidency. One of the most personal poems came from Amit Majmudar, the poet laureate of Ohio, who submitted a moving poem about his mother becoming a U.S. citizen. It’s a long poem, but it ends:

In the year of our liar 2016 My mom became the citizen Of a strange America. Improbability, too, is a force of nature. We couldn’t not watch. Unnatural untruths become natural lies.

In 2016, my mom became a naturalized Citizen just in time to watch America denature.

Najma Menai of West Lafayette, Ind., a student at Purdue, says that writing poetry is “one of the chief ways I’m keeping myself sane these days.” She submitted this poem warning against Trump’s antics distracting us from critical issues:

He will say something awful And cause quite the fuss Until that one thing Is all we discuss.…

So when Trump says The wall will now be a fence Worry more about Bannon and Priebus and Pence….

And when he acts like a child On the global stage Worry more about How you, yes you, must engage

Richard Kenney, a poet who teaches at the University of Washington, offered a lovely poem about our “commander in tweet.” Two excerpts:

We mustn’t slander our Twitter Commander, he’ll burble our bird and snatch our bander and fire off a tweet with his hot little hand, or maybe report us, so stay discreet—Commander in Tweet! Commander in Tweet! Muster the army, commission the fleet! He’s a patsy for Putin, buffoon complete— (And that old Constitution? Hit Delete—)

I held this contest partly because we’ve all heard so much commentary about Trump, and I figured that verse might offer a new lens through which to see our president. It also struck me that there are fears that Trump will slash budgets for the humanities and the arts, including the National Endowment for the Arts. So it seemed appropriate to applaud the artists fighting the perverse with verse — and in that spirit, I’ll give the last word to Susan McLean, a poet and English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University:

Trump seethes at what the writers say. He’ll pull the plug on the N.E.A. The joke’s on him. Art doesn’t pay. We write our satires anyway.